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VMA’s new chairman for 2012-13, Mark Cordell, first attended VMA’s annual meeting in the year the association was celebrating its 50th anniversary. It is perhaps fitting, then, that Cordell, who is president of Distributed Valves for Cameron Valves & Measurement, is taking over the reins during another momentous occasion: the 75th anniversary of VMA’s founding.

In the past, utility personnel didn’t want the public to have to think much about sewer and water treatment plants. The idea was to build the public’s trust that tap water was safe and reliable and wastewater was treated properly.

Today, however, as municipalities struggle to find funds to maintain and upgrade these essential services, many feel a public awareness campaign may be in order.

Although this year’s Market Outlook had its share of gloomy news regarding international economic woes, a bright spot in many of the speakers’ comments was India. That country, which did not have nearly the magnitude of problems during the Great Recession as the rest of the world, has seen consistently large year-over-year gains in the last decade and a half as it has learned to deal with the major economic reforms that began in the early 1990s.